bradKELLETT

One of my latest projects is PlaceWidget, a service that lets you embed a Foursquare widget into any website (now with a WordPress plugin and a Facebook App). When I kicked off development of PlaceWidget, I had three goals in mind: Make it as easy as possible to configure Make it as easy as possible [...]

I’ve been using a little bash script I wrote that will automatically minify any Javascript and CSS files recursively in a directory with the YUI Compressor, and I thought I’d share it with the world. With the script, you can chose to minify just Javascript (with the -j option), just CSS (with the -c option), [...]

Call me paranoid or call me efficient, but I don’t like non-minified CSS and Javascript accessible in a production environment. It’s one thing setting up your web application to use minified files when it’s rolled out , but I’d prefer that the originals aren’t available at all – and yes, part of that is me [...]

In web applications, there are times when you may want to track activity of a user within your page – perhaps your project includes a realtime component that you want to pause when the user isn’t actually working with the page, for example. This is pretty easy to take care of, but there are a [...]

I have the utmost respect for the engineers at Facebook. They are a very talented bunch, and the few of them I’ve had the pleasure to meet in person have even been nice folks to boot. Generally, they come up with very innovative and progressive engineering solutions to the huge problems they face, but their [...]

Zizhuang Yang, an engineering intern at Facebook this last summer, recently put up a very interesting and detailed post on the company’s engineering blog describing extensive user testing of various loading styles and times for Facebook he conducted as part of his internship. While the whole post is worth a read, one point really piqued [...]

I get asked how to make a Javascript accordion all the time, and there are a lot of great framework plugins and code snippets around, but most of the time the features that these plugins include just aren’t needed. So, here is just about the most basic Javascript accordion you could make, using just a [...]

The release of Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 a few weeks before it heralded the implementation of a feature that I believe will push web application development into the next age. The feature, called Javascript web workers, will allow web apps to have far more advanced features without the slowdown experienced even with today’s Javascript-heavy [...]

I hit an interesting problem the other day – take a list of sorted items (in this case, an ordered list of names) and insert a new item in the correct position in the list with Javascript, preserving the sort order. It turns out that this isn’t so hard to do with the help of [...]

Note: This is skewed toward computer science courses. I’m interested to see if it is the same in other subjects. I have long had a belief that universities are, by and large, completely out of touch with the real world. This may not count for all universities/colleges or their staff, but in my experience most [...]